White Girls (2 page)

Even though SL and I talked on a more or less daily basis from 1989 on, there were certain things I was never entirely comfortable discussing with him, such as AIDS, and my queerness. By the time I met him, I was so used to being on my own in the latter, and felt so alone in the former, that, even after my beloved K died, in 1992, I had no real language for that part of my life that dick transcended, and degraded.

I met K in 1981, in New York; we were students at the same college. He had the straightest back and longest neck—just like SL. Even though he was straight off the boat from Connecticut when we met and he resembled, then, a young Montgomery Clift—he looked like an older Montgomery Clift when he was dying—K’s demeanor was as disciplined and colored as SL’s, which is to say K’s affect was not too far removed from how Flannery O’Connor might have described someone like SL when she wrote: “[The Negro] is a man of very elaborate manners and great formality which he uses superbly for his own protection and to insure his own privacy.” In his privacy K often fell in love with his opposite—big men with big, expansive feelings; the turn-on for him was in trying to stitch them up and make them behave properly. We always failed him.

SL met K a few months after I met SL, who said, after meeting him: I watched you guys walk into the restaurant, and I thought: “Oh, they’re married.” We were. At college K studied art history, and I studied him. That’s how you recognize love: you’ve never met it before. Even before I knew who K was he interested me. At first, he irritated me. Sitting behind him as a Tintoretto or a Gorky flashed across one art history course screen or another, I saw K’s neck, his freshly laundered shirt, his neatly sharpened pencils, and his readiness to do well. I didn’t recognize him because I didn’t recognize any of that in myself. Our love was a confusion of non-twinning, that is, we didn’t recognize anything of ourselves in the other. We were not lovers, or we were lovers in every way except one. I shall never forget how our lips felt when we’d kiss good-night. I shall never forget what his little body felt like, in sickness and in health. And I shall never forget him saying, “Oh, Bear,” as he hugged me good-night. I’ll never get over him, nor the fact that he understood how I was never able to grasp that, for most people, love and conflict were the same thing, and, if that was really the case, what did that say about their love? When it came to love, K was practical and traditional: for him, it was not separate from conflict and conflict was not separate from marriage. So when I would start to absent myself from a scene—the inevitable buildup that comes with getting close to anyone—K yelled, “Don’t withdraw!” as I climbed into his little bed. (We did some of our best thinking together lying in his bed.) His anger could not beat my silence, though, and so, after a while, he gave up and climbed into bed with me. Another time—K had finished college by then, I never did; he was living in the East Village, I’d just gotten
my little flat in Brooklyn—K was angry with me about one thing or another. This time I wouldn’t take it. He stormed off to the supermarket; there, a black woman accidentally bumped into K’s cart with her own. K exploded—“I’ve had it with you people and your anger!”—a remark that not only made me laugh, but made me love him more. By then it was 1987 or 1988, and we weren’t even thirty. K was thin and white and he loved and identified with white girls like Mariel Hemingway as she appeared in the 1979 motion picture
Manhattan
. I’d never felt like part of a couple before. We
did
things together. The only time I felt as though we’d separated was when we went to gay bars together. But when it comes to gay bars, it’s every man for himself. K was one pretty white girl. As such, he had a certain currency in those bars that made me feel jealous: couldn’t the world see he was mine? Couldn’t the world see I was his universe, and he mine? While we each had boyfriends (K more than me; I couldn’t physically take how much I wanted to be loved and how much I felt when I was; K was made of the world and, so, of much stronger stuff) they were animal-smart enough to know that the real connection was between K and myself. Inevitably, one of his boyfriends but more likely one of mine because that was the only real power they had in the relationship, threatening not to love me, they were men after all and getting there was always on their mind—anyway, more than one of these guys hit on K after they broke up with me. But I wouldn’t have known about it had K not told me. Once, after he relayed that So and So had come on to him, K said: “I don’t know why I told you that! I don’t know why!” I didn’t know why, either, but I knew who K was, and I knew he could and did fall in love with that which
I could not love: the blowhard boy, the taking-up-too-much-space boy, the hysterical boy, the consumerist boy, because they were as glamour-struck as K was struck by their surface glamour. I wanted to love K as a lover but I wanted him to get this kind of person out of his system first. But couldn’t he see I loved him more than any of those horned-up lunkheads, and that he could sometimes be like them in that he wanted to get at some essential part of me that was my own and couldn’t be touched, in the Flannery O’Connor sense? Were all white girls like that?

Of course, SL was more than aware, emotionally and otherwise, of what was happening as K began to leave. SL drove me to K’s funeral in Connecticut. He even helped me walk K down the stairs in the tenement building K lived in before he died so he could get home to Connecticut to be with his family one last time. SL even had dinner with my beloved and me and another friend on K’s last New Year’s Eve on earth, December 1991, and then SL drove him home, trying hard not to look at K’s body leaving his life—while sporting a cravat, even. For a time, after they first met, K would sometimes twitch in SL’s presence. And while K could let his periodic impulse to hurt but not his jealousy show—“I don’t know why I told you that!”—I wonder, now, if my twinship with SL flooded him with feelings he couldn’t sort out. When K was growing up in Connecticut, the Black Panthers were on trial in New Haven. This was in 1970; he was eight. One day, his mother drove her children into New Haven to do a little shopping. Upon arriving, his mother told her kids to lock the car doors because “those Panthers were loose.” And K remembered thinking: Oh, let them in, let them in. SL and I let him in. Sometimes things got even
more confusing. Once, K’s boyfriend threw me a birthday party. I was twenty-three and K was twenty. After the party, K found me in bed with a woman. Later, over breakfast, K was tight-lipped for a long time. I don’t think I remember asking him what was wrong because I knew what was wrong. Finally, he exploded. “You were in bed with B!” Did K want to be my only white girl? It was a marriage.

SL listened to me sob on the telephone once, after my beloved was diagnosed: But he’s only thirty. He doesn’t even know who
he
is. SL stood by my side as the lid was placed on K’s coffin and the dirt was being shoveled. There was a figurine on top of the coffin lid—a dark Jesus. Looking at that Christ, SL said, I bet K would like that black Jesus on top of him. And without hearing what SL said through his tears, I murmured through my own: I bet K will like that black Jesus on top of him. Then we said good-bye and SL became the only one for a long time.

SL and I met at an alternative weekly, where we both worked in the art department; I was the department assistant, SL a freelance graphic designer. By way of introduction he would shyly offer me things he thought might interest me: postcards, books, photographs. One of the first postcards he sent me was by the photographer Helen Levitt. It showed two colored boys on a street in New York, in the nineteen forties. One boy is facing the camera; the other boy’s back faces the camera. Their arms are linked. They look like two sides of the same coin, like Janus. SL passed along a play: Ibsen’s
John Gabriel Borkman
. In it, twin sisters long to be loved by or control the same man. He
dies. In the end, the twins accept being “twin sisters...of one mind.” Because of SL—he loved her work—I also read Gertrude Stein’s
Ida: A Novel
. In it, Ida, the heroine, wishes for a twin. She writes letters to her imaginary twin, also named Ida. “Dear Ida my twin,” one such letter begins. Then, continuing, “Are you beautiful as beautiful as I am dear twin Ida, are you, and if you are perhaps I am not.” SL gave me a VHS tape:
Chained for Life
(1951). In it, real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton star in a fiction about their struggle for love, set against a show-business backdrop. No man can separate them, though; they’re emotionally “chained for life.” Then there was
Thought to Be Retarded
, written and designed by SL himself. It was based on a performance he’d done in collaboration with the photographer Daniel Lerner. Their piece was based on the story of Grace and Virginia Kennedy, the famous German American twins born in Georgia in the early nineteen seventies, who developed their own language and were “thought to be retarded” because their parents, social workers, and speech therapists alike couldn’t understand them. (The Kennedy girls were themselves the subject of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s exceptional 1980 documentary
Poto and Cabengo
.)

SL and I had both grown up feeling that the language we spoke was somehow incomprehensible or fuzzy to those around us. He’d spent his adolescence on army bases in England, France, and Germany, while I had no direct experience with white people until I was a teenager. SL’s parents were middle-class American Negroes from the Midwest who went to work in Europe to escape, if it can be done, racism. (SL’s father taught college-level chemistry on various army bases, while his mother worked as an administrator.)
But his father brought that racism with him. Like many men of his background, his racism was really counterphobic: he revered white people. That his only son couldn’t assimilate enough for his angry, continually disappointed father—an impossible task; SL was a black kid in a white world; no matter how much he was lauded or fucked over in that world, he would always be black—was just one of the small crucifixions SL endured for his father’s sake. Other nails and splinters: the irrefutable sense that he didn’t really know why he was here, in the world, at all. He had no I because he had no country. He would not have his maleness because that was a sick and diseased and controlling thing—like his father.

In the late early nineteen seventies, SL, a tremendous reader, began to hear bits of himself not in Piri Thomas or Eldridge Cleaver but in Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Carolee Schneemann, and Robin Morgan: women who were of SL’s class, more or less, and had experienced, growing up, something akin to what he had known at the hands of a father: being subject to emotional violence because they owned you, you were their property. He and his mother had grown up in what Shulamith Firestone called “shared oppression.” The difference between her and her son was that she believed it: Wasn’t her pain the pain you suffered for family? Later SL would withstand mountains of pain for his family. But in the early nineteen-seventies he did two things: he got out, if only he could get out. That is, SL moved forward into his future, but his past resented it. He had boundless hope, but his past thought otherwise. Leaving home, he
would kiss white women, or they would kiss him, with no expectation and every expectation, and then—sometimes—he would turn to me and love me as he had been loved in his past, walking in the Black Forest or wherever, tagging along behind his parents in his Eton cap, wondering about the forest worms as he served as an audience for his parents’ follies, their seemingly endless marital drama of acceptance and rejection, a form of theater many mothers, for instance, try to justify by saying, We’re staying together for the kids’ sake. That’s the first lie of family. It’s never for the kids’ sake. Why has no mother, including Hamlet’s own, not admitted to her libidinal impulses, saying this crazy-ass dick or uncontrollable freak works for me, I could never do what
he
does in the world, be so out of control, terrible and boundaryless, I’m a woman, confined by my sex, prohibited from acting out because other lives, my children’s lives, depend on me, but still there’s my husband acting out for me, what a thrill as he crashes against the cage of my propriety. What no mother in history, including Hamlet’s own, has ever been able to entirely process, let alone admit: My husband may not actually be our child’s type.

From the first, SL and I were each other’s hall of mirrors, and is this me currently looking at my parents, or SL looking at his parents? Was it my mother’s competitive desire to make a kind of glued-together, unforgettable art out of her marriage, all the while saying: Who could make a better thing out of it? Me or your father? Wait. Who said that? My mother, or SL’s mother? Was it SL’s mother or my mother whom we loved beyond her comprehension, hating that she treated her own body as a thing to be manipulated by male hands, something that reinforced her idea of male authority, which she admired even as
she did and did not admire her son’s repudiation of it, a rejection that made her ashamed of her need for it, and so there was nothing for it but to reject the son as weak, poetic, a loving pussy to be tolerated and sometimes reviled. Who could love her for having such thoughts? Who could say? SL and I were each other’s hall of mirrors, each a kind of Marvin Gaye in relation to our respective fathers, but SL got away, and left Europe for the United States. I can’t bear this part of the story, the he-got-away part, even if it was the best thing for him, and it was, because it presages his getting away from me, the very embodiment of his boyhood isolation.

I ate dirt until he came along. I had what they called the ringworm. I picked my scalp and there it was, underneath my fingernails, piles of sick. I was a preteen Caliban deformed by flaky skin; I had pus on my mind. My head was a compost heap. My fingernails dug into what they, the older people, called the ringworm, or eczema, and I sent shivers down my own spine—an erotic “pain” I could not wait to get my hands on. My gray woolen Eton cap was lousy with me. There was SL in his Eton cap and his forest of worms, and there I was in my cap, waiting until he came along. My contemporaries—other children—risked contagion if they touched my cap, let alone my diseased spot, which, come to think of it, looked a little like a woman’s private parts; boys spitballed it.